Page:Japanese Wood Engravings.djvu/70

56 most capricious fashion, sometimes introducing vanishing points with fair accuracy in one part of the picture, while drawing the rest on the Chinese isometric plan, but never displaying any real study of the principles of the science. Hokusai's sketch in Fig. 24 is perhaps the best attempt to apply European teaching.

The fourth term, during which were produced most of the finest examples of pictorial engraving in black and colours, ended about 1828. It was followed by a period in which Hokusai, now associated with a new generation, stood pre-eminent.

The most interesting publications of the fifth period, extending from the death of Toyokuni to the death of Hokusai, were the later volumes of the Mangwa, the Fugaku hiak'kei, or hundred views of the Peerless Mountain, and many other books by Hokusai, which proved that the eye of the "Ancient of a Hundred Centuries" (Man ro-jin) as he called himself in his later years, had become more correct, while his hand had lost none of its cunning, and he still held his place unchallenged down to the year of his death. The Fugaku hiak'kei may be indicated as one of the best examples of the engraving of the period. His associates in the latter half of his career were Keisai Yeisen, from whose album of rough sketches Figs. 26 and 27 are reproduced, Utagawa Kunisada, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Ichiriusai Hiroshigé, Haségawa Settan, Haségawa Settei, and Matsukawa Hanzan. Kunisada (who in 1844 adopted the name of his teacher, Toyokuni) and Kuniyoshi supplied innumerable designs to the publishers of chromoxylographic broadsides, which showed all the old strength of design, but for the most part ruined by cheap European pigments. They also illustrated several books, mostly novelettes and theatrical literature, but the Kaibiaku yuraiki, an historical work, and the Kuniyoshi zatsugwa, are good examples of the work of Kuniyoshi outside the single sheets, which occupied his chief energies. Kunisada died in 1865 at the age of seventy-eight, and Kuniyoshi in 1861 at the age of sixty-one.

The establishment of an offshoot of the Utagawa theatrical school at Osaka was a special feature in the fifth period. This appears